


i will not ask (and neither should you)

by CloudCover (RainyForecast)



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Angst, Coming of Age, First Love, M/M, Mention of Death, Mention of blood, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 13:41:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21162566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainyForecast/pseuds/CloudCover
Summary: There was something wrong with the house at the end of the street.





	i will not ask (and neither should you)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zhenya71](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zhenya71/gifts).

There was something wrong with the house at the end of the street. 

It wasn't any definable thing that a person could point at and say: this is wrong. It just was, and if you lived on that street for any length of time, you learned never to ask about it. 

Old Mrs. Johnston who lived in the second to last house, right next to the-house-that-was-wrong, let her arborvitae grow very, very tall on that side of the property, and nobody blamed her. 

Zhenya didn’t understand the words they used when they spoke about the house, not at first, but he understood the way their eyes slid over it, the way all the sidewalk chalk art stopped before it reached the cracked, uneven portion in front of it. The way people snatched at toddlers and too-curious dogs, leading them quickly away, no matter how intriguing the overgrown roses threatening to spill over the jagged, peeling fence.

As a child, Zhenya was afraid of the house. When he learned enough English to understand a little of the horror stories the neighborhood children whispered to each other, his mind filled in the gaps he didn’t grasp with additional terrors. It was haunted, it was a witch’s house, a monster lurked within, the house was the monster itself. 

It’s just an old, sad house with no one in it, his mother told him when he appeared, like a tremulous little ghost himself, at her bedside when the nightmares woke him. She kissed his tear-wet cheek and tell him not to worry, sad things were just sad, not frightening. 

So in his baby heart he felt sorry for the sad, sad house, and sometimes he would sneak off to the very edge of its front yard, pull himself up very bravely, and tell its blank, black windows not to be sad, everything would be alright in the end. 

By the time he wasn’t a child anymore, he didn’t really believe in things coming out all right in the end. And he didn’t think about the house at all. 

***

It was summer. A summer of painful, stretched out limbs and acne and getting so, so angry at all the world that he punched a hole in his bedroom drywall. 

Everything made him angry-- the other kids at school who made fun of his accent, his haircut, his moodiness. He was angry with his brother. His parents. The heat, the way the laces on his hand-me-down shoes frayed, the great, confusing morass of the future. Anything and everything. 

He indulged in all the few small, mostly secret rebellions that he dared. Slamming doors in his parent’s faces. A pack of cigarettes pilfered from Denis’ stash. A magazine under his mattress with photos of naked men where the other boys, as far as he knew, anyway, had pictures of naked women. 

He hadn’t actually smoked any of the cigarettes yet- he hadn’t dared. But one sweltering afternoon he fought, loudly, too truthfully, with his mother, and the guilty furious blood pounding in his ears made him pelt out of the house, cigarettes and a lighter he’d stolen from the Shell station secreted in his jeans pockets. 

He stood on the sidewalk, skinny chest heaving, and his stinging eyes landed on the house at the end of the street. No one, absolutely no one, went anywhere near it. Perfect. 

He broke a window at the back of the house with a tree branch, after nearly falling through the rotting back deck. He knocked out the shards of glass with too little care, and cut himself. Copper was heavy on his tongue as he climbed through, sucking the blood from the gash across the base of his thumb. 

Everything inside was dim, and filled with a thick, cloying silence that settled on him like a weight. It smelled of mold and still air. 

Despite himself, some of his childhood terror resurfaced. His hands shook a little as he pulled a cigarette from the pack, and the cellophane crinkled too loudly. The place felt like a tomb. 

It took three flicks to clumsily coax a flame from the lighter. The first drag burned, and he hacked and gagged, and accidentally shook some hot ash into the faded carpet. He ground out the embers with his heel and felt the first stirrings of guilt. For the cigarette, for trespassing, for yelling at his mother, and especially for the tears he’d seen welling in her eyes as he’d left. 

He took another drag of the cigarette, coughing a little less this time. The guilt unfurled a little further, and when he met his own eyes in the age-spotted mirror over the mantle he had to look away. 

He wanted to stop thinking, so he decided to have a look around. Might as well, now that he was here. He slunk quietly around, wary of the sagging, uneven floors. It was all very, very still, and disappointingly empty. A cursory exploration of the kitchen and living room revealed nothing but mouse droppings and gently decomposing furniture. 

The only thing that gave him pause was the doorway into the kitchen. Marks had been made against the doorpost, to measure the growth of a child, or children. He reached out to touch one, wondering who they had been. There wasn’t a name, just a series of scrawled dates, decades before Zhenya had been born. 

He started to feel a little sick from the cigarette. He ground it out in the sink, and wondered how on earth he was going to hide the smell of it clinging to his clothes and hair. One more thing for him and his parents to fight over. 

He sighed, and turned to head back the way he came. When he turned the corner to reenter the living room, he pulled up short. There was someone standing there. 

His back was to Zhenya. He stood facing the broken window, motionless, hands at his sides. He looked young, even from the back. Zhenya’s pulse slowed. Just someone like him, a kid looking for trouble. 

“Hey,” he said roughly, and the boy slowly turned. He had wide eyes that looked dark in the dim light of the room, and a mouth too red for his pale face. 

“What you do here?” Zhenya brazened. As if he had any more cause to be where he was. The boy had bare feet, Zhenya dimly noticed. And there was still glass all over the floor. 

“I-- nothing,” the boy says. “What are _ you _doing here?” 

Zhenya waved the pack of cigarettes in lieu of an answer, then decided to be generous. “You want?”

The boy wrinkled his nose, and looked faintly disgusted. “No, thank you.” 

Struck with the sudden urge to look cool, Zhenya shook out a cigarette and lit it, willing his lungs to cooperate. The boy still had a soft, baby face but he was… pretty. It was the only word that seemed to fit. And something about the heavy quiet of the house let Zhenya admit it to himself. 

“What’s your name? Mine is Zhenya,” he said. “I’m not see you at school.”

“Sidney,” the boy said, then repeated his question. “What are you _ doing _ here?” 

“Smoke,” Zhenya retorts, just to be an ass, but something about the boy’s steady gaze made him continue, more truthfully. “Fight with my mother.” 

“Oh,” Sidney said, and the word was dense with judgement, and something like regret. 

“Fuck off,” Zhenya all but snarled, and ground out the cigarette. His anger extinguished with it and his shoulders slumped. “Watch out for feet, there’s glass.” 

“Oh, right,” Sidney said, and picked his way carefully to the couch. He curled up in the corner of it, drawing his legs up to rest his chin on his knees. He had muscular calves, like he played sports. Zhenya liked them. 

He sat on the other end of the couch, coughing at the resulting cloud of dust. 

“What’d you fight with your mom about?” Sidney asked. His steady gaze made Zhenya sigh, and the whole story fountained out of him, in guttering spurts of broken English. Sidney didn’t seemed to mind, only listened with his eyes fixed on Zhenya’s face. 

“You should go home,” Sidney said gently, when Zhenya’s wildly gesturing hands fell quiet and he slumped back into the musty cushions, spent. “Talk to your mom.” 

Zhenya noted the deepening shadows of the room and nodded. “I know.” He didn’t feel angry any more. Just emptied out, and ashamed. 

He looked over at Sidney, at the curve of his mouth and his shoulders with their promise of breadth. 

“You come here again?” Zhenya asked. 

“Oh,” Sidney said, and smiled. “For sure.” 

Zhenya stood, dislodging another cloud of dust. Movement in the corner of his eye nearly made him jump, before he remembered: the damn mirror over the mantle. He glanced at it. 

He was alone. The reflected couch behind him was empty. When he looked down, Sidney was still sitting there, gazing up at him. 

The glass on the window frame sliced through his jeans to his skin when he vaulted through it, but he didn’t stop until he was home again, dripping blood on his mother’s linoleum floors, chest burning, refusing to say where he’d been. 

***

“Who are you?” he asked the stillness of the house. 

He’d told himself he was never going back there. But he’d gone to the library in search of answers, made it through a garbled, fruitless conversation with a librarian, and retreated in shame with his metaphorical tail between his legs. And he had to know. 

The house was silent through four of his rapid, shallow breaths. 

“I told you,” said a voice from behind him, and he yelped, whirling around to find Sidney standing right where he’d been when Zhenya had first met him. He was wearing the same white t shirt, and his feet were still bare. 

“I told you,” he repeated. “I’m Sidney.” 

“What are you?” Zhenya rephrased. “Ghost? You dead?” 

“What? I don’t—“ Sidney’s face crumpled in confusion, before smoothing out, eerily blank. “I don’t...know.” 

“When you die?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“What’s happen?” 

“I don’t _ know_!” 

“Where’s family?” 

“_I_ _don’t_ _know_!” 

The mirror shattered, shards of it raining down around the fireplace. 

“I don’t know, I don’t know—“ Sidney had his balled fists pressed to his head. 

What have I done, Zhenya thought to himself. 

He reached out, doubting his hands would even make contact, but they did. He grasped Sidney’s shoulders and gave him a little shake. 

“Stop. I’m sorry, okay, Sidney? I’m sorry. It’s okay.” 

Sidney stared up at him. Chest heaving, eyes red and wet. “Zhenya?” he said, lip wobbling. And then, like a candle extinguishing, he was gone. 

***

Zhenya doesn’t see him again until the fourth time he visited the house. 

“That was shitty,” Sidney snapped, as if no time had passed since their last conversation. 

“Very sorry.” Zhenya did his best to show how contrite he was. It _ had _been shitty of him. 

Sidney curled up in the corner of the sofa again. “So are you still fighting with your mom?” 

Zhenya obeyed the unspoken cue, and dutifully sat down to tell him. 

***

“What happen,” Zhenya tried to ask, some time later. “When I’m leave?” 

“I don’t--” 

“Yes, okay, don’t know. Don’t be upset, Sid.”

***

What could he do, to cheer up a ghost? Zhenya gingerly climbed through the window the very next day, with a pack of playing cards in his back pocket. Sidney was absent, so Zhenya sat down on the floor and idly shuffled the cards back and forth. 

He had just, in, boredom, laid out a game of solitaire when he caught a flash of white t shirt in the shadows of the kitchen doorway. 

“Neat,” Sidney said. “Hey, do you know how to play poker?” 

Zhenya grinned, wide, puffing out his chest a little. “I’m best.” 

“Dude. Teach me," Sidney said as he settled cross-legged on the floor opposite him. 

Zhenya shuffled the cards with a lot of unnecessary flash. “I’m best teacher, too. You see.” 

Sidney made a noise that Zhenya would almost have classified as a giggle, except he was pretty sure boys did not _giggle_. Nonetheless, he liked being the cause of it. 

“Watch and learn,” he said, nose in the air, copying a line from a movie he’d seen once. “Watch and learn.”

***

It was a strange, dreamlike summer. Zhenya’s mother finally stopped asking him, worry thinning her voice, where he was going all the time. As long as he was home by dark and didn’t come home bloody or smelling like cigarettes, she said, she supposed it was the best she could ask for. 

***

“Can you leave?” Zhenya had to ask. “You try before?” 

Sidney wouldn’t look at him. “Don’t you fucking think—“ 

“Okay, okay.”

***

It was raining the first time Sid leaned over a game of Texas Hold’em, and kissed Zhenya. 

Summer thunder rumbled overhead and rain spattered in through the broken window as Zhenya learned the taste of Sid’s mouth, learned how it felt to slide his hands up under the back of Sid’s shirt to feel the play of muscle there. To bury his nose in Sid’s hair and wonder how it could smell like Irish Spring soap. 

Just as he always did, Sid vanished between one breath and the next. Zhenya was left alone, lying on the floor with their discarded playing cards in a halo around him, arm flung over his eyes so that he wouldn’t cry. 

***

“I want help you,” he pleaded, the next time Sid appeared. Sid just looked at him, lost. 

“I wish you could,” he confessed later, face tucked into the curve of Zhenya’s neck. “I wish you could help me.” 

***

Over and over, Sid trailing begrudgingly along behind him, Zhenya searched the house for some sign, some clue as to who Sid was, or had been. Nothing remained. The most morbid corners of Zhenya’s brain supplied him with grotesque ideas. 

“I’m pretty sure,” Sid said snidely, “That my skeleton is not buried in the basement.”

“Have to check,” he protested, and doggedly drove his shovel into the hard-packed earth again while Sid got revenge by sitting by the lantern Zhenya brought and refusing to help. Instead, he read aloud the ending of every comic book Zhenya had brought that day, gleefully spoiling each and every single one. 

***

Empty, and skeleton-less as the house proved to be, there were things that seemed...wrong. A water stain on the living room ceiling was there one day, gone the next, then twice as large on the third. The vines that crawled in through the window Zhenya had broken budded, blossomed, then were buds again in the space of a day. The following week the green leaves lay yellowing and crisp on the floor. Zhenya left the pack of playing cards behind, and they were gone, only to reappear scattered all over the downstairs bedroom, where Zhenya never went.

Zhenya chalked it up to some kind of ghost business connected to Sid, until the day he witnessed a long, gnarled scab, half-healed, materialize on the back of his own hand. The hockey cards he had been showing to Sid fluttered out of his nerveless fingers. 

Sid grabbed his hand, turning it this way, and that. Zhenya could feel Sid trembling. He dropped Zhenya’s hand as if it had burned him. 

“Go,” Sid told him darkly. “Get out.”

He might never have come back, except that he turned at the last minute and caught the expression on Sid’s face as he stood framed by the broken window glass, watching Zhenya leave.

Right before he got to his own front door, he tripped, and a loose nail gouged a scratch down the back of his unblemished hand. 

*** 

Sid punched him when Zhenya came back, but then he wrapped his shaking fists in Zhenya’s shirt and let Zhenya hold him. 

Sid was the perfect height to tuck up under Zhenya’s chin, and to Zhenya Sid felt both like he belonged there, and like Zhenya should never have dared to touch him at all. 

***

Zhenya lay on the carpet of the house’s living room, staring at the square of sky he could see from the window at that angle. Summer was fading, there was a bite to the air now in the evenings, and the edges of the leaves outside were starting to look as if they were thinking of fall. 

That meant something but Zhenya couldn’t really remember what. He let the thought slip away from him like a fish down a stream. 

“You need to go home,” Sid told him, terse and worried. 

Zhenya had to blink and focus for a moment to remember what he meant by that. 

***

His mother looked up when he came in the door. He still felt full of the silence of the house, felt a little like there was a fog between him and the world. 

“What did you do, walk out and then right back in?” his mother said, and laughed. “Oh Zhenya.” 

He’d been gone for hours.

***

When he told Sid about it, Sid’s face went rigid, his teeth bared in a grimace that looked almost feral. 

“Fucking. Stop. Coming. Here.” He shoved at Zhenya’s chest, hard. Then yanked him close for a kiss so artless and rough it tasted of blood. 

“If you even come back here,” Sid gritted through his teeth. “If you _ even _.”

He’d give Sid a couple days to calm down, Zhenya thought. 

*** 

But a week and a half later, Zhenya had his first day back at school. He’d grown over the summer, people moved around him in a different way that year than the year before. He felt even more disconnected. An island for the flood of humanity that was the rest of the student body to part around. 

Staring out of the window and tuning out the wrong teacher had him walking down the deserted hall between periods on his way to the office, a pink detention slip dangling carelessly from one hand. 

Then, when he turned down the hallway where most of the sophomore classes were, he froze in place at the sound of a laugh he knew like the bassline of his favorite song. 

“You’re telling me you already lost your book too—“ laughed the boy with Sid’s face, elbowing the guy next to him as they dug through their adjacent lockers. 

The second guy noticed Zhenya and elbowed Sid-but-not Sid back. Sid looked, and Zhenya waited for... a spark of recognition, for Sid to run into his arms, something. 

“What’s...up?” Not-Sid asked. He was wearing a soft red hoodie and black tennis shoes. It looked wrong. “You good, bud?” 

“Who you?” Zhenya blurted. His face felt hot and his skin was prickling and he wanted to throw up. 

“Uh, I’m Sidney?” Not-Sid said. “Crosby? I transferred from Northbridge at the beginning of the semester.” He tilted his head to one side, in a gesture so familiar Zhenya couldn’t breathe. “We play each other in sports last year, or something?” 

Zhenya could only shake his head, and walk away, breaking into a run halfway down the hall. 

***

He ran straight out of the school. He didn’t stop to report to the office, or to get the rest of his belongings out of his locker. He just left through the front doors and ran. 

***

He walked for hours, only turning homeward when dusk began to fall. When he made it to his own street, he couldn’t stop his eyes from searching out the house. 

His feet rooted themselves in the sidewalk. There was a cluster of guys in front of the house, just pulling up on their bikes, and getting off. There was a flash of white among them. Sid, with his red hoodie wadded up in one hand, flashlight in the other. His shirt underneath had been the one Zhenya knew— the one he had rucked up in order to press kisses down Sid’s chest. 

Sid was bouncing on his heels like someone at the starting block of a race, laughing at what the other guys were saying. 

“—come on,” one of the other boys was saying, when Zhenya drew closer. “Quit fucking around, dude. I will seriously pay you every cent my Nana gave me for my birthday if you just spend one night in—“

Zhenya’s head stopped taking in more. He could only see that fucking white shirt, could think about how despite all the time he’d spent at that house with Sid, Sid had always made him leave before dark. 

His Sid, who’d laughed himself sick at Zhenya’s stupid jokes, who’d obliterated him in cards and ruined the endings of all his new comic books, who had _ kissed _ him—

You could let it happen, something grasping and dark inside him whispered. Just let him go in. This must be how it happened. He’ll be there tomorrow when you come looking for him, and everything will stay the same.

Sid laughed again, lighter than Zhenya’d ever heard him laugh before. He shoved playfully at one of his friends and turned toward the house. When he put his foot on the first porch stair, Zhenya was already running. 

Sid shouted when Zhenya grabbed his arm and hauled him bodily from the steps of the house. Zhenya’s momentum sent them both flying, landing in a painful heap on the sidewalk. 

Zhenya didn’t register the angry shouts of protest, or the rough hands that hauled him up off the ground. He only looked at Sid’s face, confused, pissed off, completely without recognition.

“What the _ fuck _, what the fuck is your problem?” someone was saying, but Zhenya wasn’t listening.

“Don’t,” he said to Sid. He wrenched his arm out of the grip of the guy trying to hold him back. He was bigger than all of them. “Go some other place, not in there. Please, Sid.”

The tone was too familiar for who that version of Sid was to him. Sid’s eyes were wide, and frightened. 

“Let’s get out of here,” one of his friends spat out. “We don’t need this bullshit.” 

Zhenya stood on the sidewalk as they got on their bikes, leaving him with derisive backward glances and scornful muttering. Sid’s white t shirt glowed in the gathering dusk, and Zhenya watched him until the group turned down another street and vanished from sight. 

As soon as they were gone he slumped down onto the curb. He sat there, unmoving, until the streetlights flickered on and the neighborhood gave itself over to night. 

***

He slipped out early the next morning, and made his way to the back of the house. The window he’d broken the first time he’d met Sid was whole again, grimy but flawless, as if it had never been broken. 

When he got home, the playing cards he’d left at the house were sitting on his desk. Their edges were water-stained and brittle with age. 

He didn’t understand, and he didn’t think he ever would. 

***

He was lucky to only receive detention for playing hooky during the first week of school. He didn’t have any work to do, so he brought the cards and played round after round of distracted solitaire with himself. 

The best thing to do about Sid, he reasoned, was to stop feeling anything at all. 

***

He visited the house every morning before school, never daring to stay more than a few moments. Everything in it looked untouched. The mantlepiece mirror was whole, the bare dirt of the basement was undisturbed. The silence felt… complete. Sid was gone.

***

He was four days into his detention. The teacher on duty was giving a sanctimonious lecture to someone who had just walked in, but Zhenya wasn’t paying any attention. He stared out the window, his hands laying motionless on either side of another aborted round of solitaire. 

Someone sat heavily down at the desk in front of him with a noisy sigh and a lot of rummaging through their backpack. Zhenya watched a flock of crows settle on the roof of the adjacent building. 

He was just deciding if he wanted to bother to count them and see how many there were, when the person in front of him turned in their seat. 

“So,” they said, and Zhenya gave a start of recognition. He looked up into Sid’s hazel eyes. 

“What’s your deal?

Zhenya blinked. “Deal?”

“The other night, with the house. What was that all about?” 

Zhenya shook his head, and swept his cards into a pile. There was nowhere to even begin to explain.

“It’s bad place. Not safe.” 

“Yeah, because tackling me to the ground like a linebacker was _ so _much safer,” Sid said, and Zhenya had to smile because that bitchy tone was so familiar. Sid narrowed his eyes. Zhenya shrugged. 

“It’s work. You don’t go in.” 

“Your logic is shit. “

Zhenya just shook his head, and kept his eyes on the cards he was shuffling back into a stack, so that he wouldn’t look at Sid like he was in love with him. 

“Hey do you know how to play--” 

“Poker. Yes, I’m know.” 

Sid wrinkled his nose at him, but held out a hand. “Show me?” 

Zhenya let himself look up, and smile. And he dealt the cards. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This is not the story I set out to write, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. If I ever finish that first one, I’ll let you know.


End file.
